After spending every work day with classrooms full of tweens and teens, then going home to three boys of her own, two of whom fall into the tween/teen category, you'd think that Amy Durham might like to leave the world of teenagers behind. Not so! Instead, she spends her spare moments - which sometimes consist of waiting twenty minutes for her oldest kiddo to get out of band practice - with her laptop and a multitude of teenage characters trying to navigate their way through the twisted, difficult road of adolescence. You might ask... "Why Young Adult Fiction"? Well, because it's what she knows. As a teacher and a parent, Amy is around tweens and teens on an almost constant basis. And while it's true they can be - ahem - challenging, they are also full of life, vision, and dreams. And that's a really cool place to be. Young Adult Fiction allows young readers the opportunity to find hope for the situations they find themselves in, find determination to keep on going, and courage to pursue their dreams. It also allows adult readers the chance to revisit the exuberance of youth, remember the joy and poignancy of first love, and recall how it felt to dream with abandon. Amy Durham is a wife and mother, an author, a teacher, an avid reader, and a musician. If she wasn't writing books, she'd be a celebrity chef!